pandora

posted by jack at 02:45 CET in / compute

My pal James tipped me off to the existence of pandora, which lets you create your own streaming virtual radio station, continually feeding your head with music you like, often things you had never heard of and wouldn't have guessed you would like! The way it works is that you tell pandora the names of some bands you like, and it uses that as a basis to begin choosing songs that it thinks you will like. The "editors" at pandora have listened to thousands of albums, categorized their content by assigning attributes based on the sounds, and put it all in a database. So, if you start off by entering Tiny Tim as your favorite artist, presumably you'd get a stream full of artists who sing falsetto, or play ukelele, or both. [note to self: create Tiny Tim-based pandora station and see what happens]

To top it off, the virtual stations you create can be shared with others! I now submit for your listening pleasure my first pandora-station: rock bastard. It gave James a headache; hopefully you're made of harder stuff.

scratch

posted by jack at 10:25 CET in / compute

A few weeks ago, I became the proud owner of an iPod Nano. It now accompanies me everywhere. Whether I'm commuting, coding, or cooking, chances are I've got my preciousss in a pocket or otherwise on my person.

The only downside is that the shiny black surface gets scratched insanely easily! When reports first came out about this last fall, I figured it was the whining of some perfectionists. But now that I've got one myself, I've seen the light (and the scratches). I've carried cellphones around for years without this kind of scuffing. I used one phone from June 2003 to December 2005, and that phone looks better than my iPod did after just a week of use! During that week, I either carried it in a soft jacket pocket containing nothing else than the iPod and the headphones, but the surface looks like I've been dragging it behind a car.

Fortunately, I'm a pragmatic person, and I don' t much care how my devices look, as long as they do what they're supposed to. Unfortunately the scratching was beginning to mar the display as well, so I decided to buy some protection in the form of an iSkin Duo. This is a dual-layer silicone "condom" for the iPod. It comes in a range of color combinations, most of them brutally ugly. I chose the brown/orange combo, which I would classify as only "moderately ugly". A hard transparent plastic bit covers the screen, while the click-wheel is covered by a single layer of silicone and an optional thin plastic bit to make the wheel a little smoother. All in all, I'm really happy with this:

• I can toss my iPod into a pocket without worrrying that it's scratching up even more.
• The silicone skin makes it a little less slippery, therefore easier to grab and more difficult to drop.
• The ugliness may prevent would-be thieves from even recognizing the iPod for what it is.